Barbarians in 3.5 actually get base 4 Skill Points per level, which is more than Clerics, Fighters, Paladins, Sorcerers, and Wizards. I always took this as meaning that D&D Barbarians were intended to have more going on than just rage-smashing - stealth, tracking, nature lore, etc.
I really don’t like Lower Decks. Before you downvote, I would never tell anyone it’s bad or that they shouldn’t like it. I just really can’t figure out why most people seem to like it so much....
My story is a bit different than others. I am not a Trekkie, and most of what I know about the franchise is from cultural osmosis and from catching the odd rerun of TNG in the 90s.
I have, however, been a junior officer in a ship, and much of Lower Deck’s content struck a chord because I’ve been there. I’ve been assigned the banal tasks, I’ve argued with other crew members on an opposite watch, and I’ve had to fight for the attention of the senior officers.
Disclaimer: I am not encouraging you to join the navy just to enjoy LD. That would be silly.
Having learned French as a second language, I can say that the gendered noun thing wasn’t the most difficult aspect, but it was the most consistently annoying. There are signifiers that makes the gender of some nouns very obvious, but then there are just as many others where it feels arbitrary or even contradictory to the established trends.
I rocked a Samsung Alias 2 for 4 years before I got an iPhone 5. The e-ink keyboard was awesome how it changed when you flipped the screen open to portrait or landscape.
I don’t think I could say, honestly. My last (and first) dumb phone was a hand-me-down from my mother c2009, and I rarely used it. It spent most of its remaining life in a drawer with its battery removed, only coming out when I was going places where other forms of communication would be scarce. I think I made maybe a dozen calls (and one seriously garbled text message) before grudgingly getting a smart device in 2011.
And yes, my Boomer mother had gone through multiple cell phones before her Millennial son got his first.
The only Canon printer I ever owned was a piece of garbage. For whatever reason, I couldn’t just select my home wifi from a list like literally any other network-enabled device. I instead had to select an option buried several layers deep in the menus to have it try to automatically connect to an open network. Only after waiting 5 minutes for this to fail would it show a list of available networks.
Of course, it also forgot the network and password settings every time it lost power, so I had to go through the whole process again after time I unplugged the thing to clean behind the shelf.
I mean, it should have died years ago the last time they unceremoniously dumped talent over apparently ideological reasons, but they survived.
Granted, this time is different because now they are losing their primary breadwinner. They plodded along before because ZP still brought in people. This wound may actually be fatal.
Shadowheart, Gale, and Karlach. My custom character is an Oath of the Ancients Paladin. I’m currently about halfway through through Act 2.
I don’t bother swapping, even for lockpicking and disarming. I instead respecced Gale to have 16 Dexterity and Sleight of Hand proficiency. I haven’t yet encountered any check that he couldn’t pass, especially with Guidance.
I’m kind of bummed about not taking Lae’zel to the creche, but I can always do that in another playthrough.
I hate this two sentence headline format (“John Doe did blankety-blank. Now he’s yadda yadda whatever”) almost as much as I hate seeing headlines with the words, “slam,” “rip,” and “sparks outrage.”
I had my players once fall into a giant underground lake that was home to a Dragon Turtle. The intent was that they would have to fend off the best while trying to get ashore because they were too low level to actually defeat it.
One of my players just so happened to have a Feather Token for a Swan Boat, which they used to trivialize the encounter and get to shore before the monster could reach them.
The only reason she had the Token was because I had given them all a few thousand gold to buy magic items with at character creation, and she had decided to buy a bunch of random consumables instead of the normal +1 weapons and armour. And the best part was that she was a very new player and probably didn’t buy the Token with any actual consideration.
When I was growing up, my two sisters and I decided what to watch on TV pretty much by pure, brutal democracy. They formed a bloc against me and I always got outvoted, so it was Little House on the Prairie (and The Waltons) every day after school.
I met my wife on a dating site, though I had an assist from a mutual friend.
My biggest takeaways were:
Don’t expect instant and constant results. You can go weeks in between meaningful matches, and at some point you will actually tap out the “market” and there will be no one new for you to see in the app.
Be selective, but not demanding. Someone having a less-than-stellar profile may just mean they are bad at writing about themselves, not that they are a boring or unpleasant person.
I feel this in my soul. My university house had mould on the bathroom ceiling, and one of my roommates was allergic - they went into violent sneezing fits every time the showered.
Our landlords tried everything to avoid addressing it, up to claiming that, “people couldn’t be allergic to mould like that.”
They only “fixed” it after one of my other roommates threatened to talk to his father who was a lawyer. Their “fix” was to paste over the ceiling with vinyl plates.
Don’t forget every magical staff , necklace, and ring that casts a spell.
Will I ever use Create Water from the Rain Dancer? Probably not, especially with Shadowheart lugging around more than a dozen bottles of water. But what if I really need it?
I seem to remember them being surprised by the success of Bravely Default, not expecting a deliberately old-school RPG to appeal to modern audiences.
The cynical part of me believes this is performative on their part - they know a game like that will be popular, but it won’t be the most popular thing ever and they won’t make all the money. So, they try to push bigger games that are more easily monetized in hopes that people will just forget their own preferences.
I’m probably on my own in being a big fan of the books and also liking the first season for the most part. Despite the changes, the world felt recognizably like Randland. I only really hated the last episode.
But that last episode was an absolute trash fire. It wasn’t just different, it was wrong. A bunch of characters and story elements are either killed off, not present to begin with, or in the wrong place at the start of the second season.
I’m willing to forgive a lot of that due to the troubles the production had with COVID and the loss of one of the main actors. All that was on top of regular old studio meddling that happens with these things.
My hope then is that the second season will go about trying to correct everything put all the characters where they are supposed to be at the start of season three, which I’m assuming will align with the third book.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”
2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)
Here’s the verse that was always given to me to support “the Bible is the word of God and 100% infallible.” Not that it’s not circular, but it does exist.
Remember, the Bible has a lot more in it than folk tales and cultural laws. There are a lot passages that are prophecy, poetry, or theology - sometimes all three at once. It’s just that the stories are a lot easier to remember and internalize.
I have to put my 25 years of religious education and devotion to use somehow now that I no longer go to church. I figure helping non-belivers better understand Christianity is a pretty worthwhile endeavour.
I grew up with the NIV, so it was just natural. It was also the default option when I went to biblegateway.com to copy the text, so I just rolled with it. I know there are some people who would be scandalized that I didn’t use the KJV, but that’s their problem, not mine.
I wouldn’t argue that the modern BIble “disowns” the OT, but some NT authors were doing their best to sweep it under the rug to make their fledgling religion more palatable to the Greeks and Romans. Early Christianity was just a sect (some might say a heresy) of Judaism, so it wasn’t inititally designed to appeal to Gentiles. With that lens, you can even argue that the apostle Paul is a more important figure in Christianity than Jesus - indeed, I’ve seen this argued a few times.
And you know what? These sorts of topics are a lot more interesting to me now that I don’t feel compelled to believe the traditional interpretation of them. I became far more interested in the development of early Christian theology after I became an atheist, probably because while I was still a Christian I was afraid of what I would find out if I challenged my beliefs at all. Not an unfounded fear as it turned out, given the arc of my life.
There is a miniscule (0.014%) chance for the very first enemies in the game to drop an extremely powerful item that normally isn’t available until much later. Getting it early is absolutely wild because one of its effects is doubling stat gains when leveling up, which can quickly snowball your characters into godhood.
My personal pet peeve is when they play an ad before giving you the menu options.
First, wait thirty seconds for them to tell me how great their mobile app is. Then listen to the options, pick one, find out I picked the wrong one, and have to go back up one level. Now I have to listen to the ad again before I can hear the options.
I don’t care how proud you are of your app, I wouldn’t be calling you if I could solve my problem with it.
I ordered a roller blind through a website. I measured the width down to the millimetre based on their instructions and triple-checked checked the measurement before submitting the order. I also selected the option to indicate that the blind was to be mounted outside my window frame (important for later).
My roller arrived two weeks later and was nearly 3cm shorter than what I had ordered. I only discovered this after I had mounted the brackets on my wall, again using their instructions (which explicitly said to use the measurements I provided in the order).
Customer service first said that this was a normal deduction made to all orders. When I asked them why they would make a deduction after asking for exact measurements in the order form, they said that they deduction was to make sure the blind fits inside the window frame.
I then pointed out that I was mounting the blind outside my window frame, as indicated in my order, and didn’t need the deduction. I also pointed out that while their product page did mention a deduction for rollers being mounted inside of a window frame, there was no indication this would apply to rollers being mounted outside of a frame like mine was. I finally pointed out that the installation instructions made no mention of the deduction and explicitly said to use them measurements from the order. They proverbially shrugged and repeated that the deduction was standard on all orders.
When I asked about a replacement, because I literally had them on record admitting to deliberately sending me a product that was different than what I had paid for, they said they wouldn’t send a replacement until I had donated the first roller to charity and sent them a receipt or thank-you letter.
I did some research just to humour them, and I could not find a charity that would take a roller blind in any condition, let alone one with no mounting hardware. And I don’t live in a small town, so it’s not like there just weren’t charities around - there were plenty, but none of them would take a roller blind. When I pointed this out to customer service, I was told to just drop the roller in a donation box and take a picture. I’m not 100% sure of the by-laws, but that sure sounds like they wanted me to record myself illegally dumping their product.
At this point I was fed up, so I left a nasty review on Google and on their product page. They were too craven to actually post my review to their website, but the Google review went up. Within a few hours they reached back and finally offered me an unconditional replacement. I still had to order a roller that was longer than what I actually needed because there was no result l way to stop them from making the deduction.
My replacement blind finally arrived six weeks after putting in the replacement order, nearly triple the wait time of the initial order.
Also, they didn’t do it to me, but other people who left bad reviews often got snidely told, “we have a 4.7 star rating on Google,” as part of the company’s public response, as if lots of people being satisfied with their products somehow negated the complaints of those who weren’t.
When I played AL I put in the minimum effort. Playing with a random group every week means no one is really going to appreciate it.
On the other hand, my current group is my close friends. Not only did we have to up write a fairly comprehensive backstories, but we also create a bunch of NPCs specifically bonded to our characters that the DM weaves into the plot. It’s really fun and engaging.
I proposed to my wife in the middle of our dingy basement apartment with no one else around. We were going out to dinner with our friends that evening to celebrate her PhD thesis defence. I asked her if she was okay with a public proposal. She said no.
So, I grabbed the ring (which she had helped me in part to pick out) from where I had stashed it and handed it to her with no ceremony or fanfare.
It was honestly more fun waiting for our friends to notice that evening.
Why YSK: It appears several Lemmy Instances are flagged as suspicious and at least 1 instance intentionally using the name of ransomware. A couple of the big enterprise monitoring suites (Fortiguard, ZScaler) will flag your account and may end up with you being pulled into an office for an explanation, or worse....
My work phone is specifically partitioned to separate personal and work activities. I can’t even copy and paste text between the two sides, they are so disconnected from each other. This is done specifically so people can use their work phone for personal business without cross-contamination.
I still refuse to use my work phone for anything but work. I only log into my personal accounts long enough to install/update a few apps from the Play Store that aren’t allowed on the work side but are still useful (MS Teams, WhatsApp).
Part of that is not wanting to enter a 12 character password every time I want to do anything simple . But the other part is that I just don’t want to mix my personal and work lives more than I have to.
“Yeah, Sauron and the orcs are bent on conquering everything and enslaving everyone, but Denethor is mean to one of his sons, so there are no angels here. I can’t in good conscience support the Free Peoples until he apologises and steps down.”
Despite other flaws, the biggest (or maybe second biggest) issue I had with Solo was Lando’s backstory.
See, I grew up reading some very old, very obscure EU books about Lando. In that series Lando was an expert card player but a poor pilot, and a lot is made of how he won the Millennium Falcon in a game of Sabacc but has no idea how to fly it. The movie reversed this, making him a card cheat.
I’m probably they only person in the world who cares.
But maybe new series, if it ever comes out, will be about Lando and his adventures with Vuffi Raa?
A federal judge in West Virginia has ruled that the state corrections agency can’t force an incarcerated atheist and secular humanist to participate in religiously-affiliated programming to be eligible for parole.
In the “Big Book,” the foundational document of these programs, “Chapter 4: We Agnostics” tells atheists and agnostics that they are “doomed to alcoholic death” unless they “seek Him.” The chapter characterizes non-believers as “handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice.”
This really jumped out at me. What a horrible thing to say about someone, especially someone looking for help.
Reporting players for in-game behaviour rarely did anything.
And there was no reporting mechanism at all if they decided to continue harassing you through DMs after the game was over - all you could do was block them.
I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them....
“Just be yourself and you’ll make lots of friends at your new school.”
Four years of constant bullying and loneliness later: I have one acquaintance that would eventually become my friend after a few more years. I also have basically no self-confidence, and my social development is set back half a decade as I’m still looking for friends to have sleepovers with when everyone else has moved on to normal teenager stuff.
You’d think so, but every couple of months there’s another post making the rounds on the internet because some oblivious person completely missed the message of their favourite band.
Smart Barbs scare me (startrek.website)
Lower Decks: Can anyone tell me what I'm missing?
I really don’t like Lower Decks. Before you downvote, I would never tell anyone it’s bad or that they shouldn’t like it. I just really can’t figure out why most people seem to like it so much....
Canada’s ‘haves-and-have-nots’ health system lags behind Europe, study finds (www.theguardian.com)
Research says funding cuts and poor organisation stop Canadians from accessing healthcare – and 20% have no doctor at all...
Speakers of non-English languages, what common mistakes do native speakers make that drive you crazy?
For example, English speakers commonly mix up your/you’re or there/their/they’re. I’m curious about similar mistakes in other languages.
What was the last dumb phone you had before your first smartphone? (lemmy.world)
I rocked a Samsung Alias 2 for 4 years before I got an iPhone 5. The e-ink keyboard was awesome how it changed when you flipped the screen open to portrait or landscape.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Remake Is Dead - Insider Gaming (insider-gaming.com)
HP Printrule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
The Escapist murica-fires Editor-in-Chief - loses Yahtzee Croshaw and entire video team in hours (twitter.com)
Fired or resigned, extremely incomplete list:...
Air Canada accused of forcing man with cerebral palsy to drag himself off plane (www.bbc.co.uk)
Companions: who and do you switch?
Who are your companions? Do you switch during gameplay?...
The Trump administration touted him as a victim of MeToo. Now he’s accused of dismembering a girlfriend (www.sfchronicle.com)
The gruesome discovery spoke to a ghastly crime....
Helpful translation guide for DMs (startrek.website)
kill me, pls... (feddit.de)
Let's talk dating apps. Do you like em? Have you used em? What's your takeaway?
As title states....
Support your landlord! (lemmy.bleh.au)
Sep 14 - Nintendo Direct MegaThread - All Announcements, with Youtube Links and Release Dates! (www.youtube.com)
Direct Link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecsVny3ebQ0...
save it for later (lemmy.ml)
Sabotage Studio initially projected sales of 250,000 copies of Sea of Stars in the first year. They hit that target within just a week. (lemmy.world)
Source tweet: twitter.com/seaofstarsgame/…/1699175546930766092
What was the worst bastardization of a classic book into a movie?
logic rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Taken from reddit
Starting the game off strong (lemmy.world)
This wasn't meant to happen! (lemmy.world)
deleted_by_author
Manage your backstory expectations lol (ttrpg.network)
Evangelicals are now rejecting 'liberal' teachings of Jesus (www.newsweek.com)
New! From Google! "Enhanced" ad privacy! (midwest.social)
Got this notification when I opened Chrome when coming back to my desk after lunch....
LimeWire.exe (i.imgur.com)
Public marriage proposals aren’t romantic – they’re a form of coercion (archive.li)
Don’t make me an unwilling participant in your embarrassing show of affection, writes Guy Walters...
YSK: Browsing "ALL" at work might get you pulled into an office, even with NSFW off.
Why YSK: It appears several Lemmy Instances are flagged as suspicious and at least 1 instance intentionally using the name of ransomware. A couple of the big enterprise monitoring suites (Fortiguard, ZScaler) will flag your account and may end up with you being pulled into an office for an explanation, or worse....
Right-Wingers be like (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Donald Glover and Brother Stephen Glover to Write ‘Lando’ Series (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
Justin Simien has exited the Disney+ project, which has Donald Glover attached to reprise his role from 'Solo: A Star Wars Story.'
Gaah! I-i-impossible! (feddit.ch)
Judge: West Virginia can't require incarcerated atheist to participate in religious programming (apnews.com)
A federal judge in West Virginia has ruled that the state corrections agency can’t force an incarcerated atheist and secular humanist to participate in religiously-affiliated programming to be eligible for parole.
What's the most toxic game community you know of?
The most toxic communities I know of are the Genshin community, Payday 2, FFXIV and source games communities in general.
horses rule geralt drools (lemm.ee)
What is the most unhelpful advice you have received?
I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them....
Checks out honestly (lemmy.world)